The modern communications era has brought about a tremendous expansion of wireline and wireless networks. Computer networks, television networks, and telephony networks are experiencing an unprecedented technological expansion, fueled by consumer demand. Wireless and mobile networking technologies have addressed related consumer demands, while providing more flexibility and immediacy of information transfer.
Current and future networking technologies continue to facilitate ease of information transfer and convenience to users. One area in which there is a demand to further improve the ease of information transfer and convenience to users involves the filtering of content and services based on a user's access rights. The growth in wireless and mobile networking technologies as well as continued development of processing power and miniaturization of high-powered processors and components used in mobile computing devices has allowed for the access of content and services by even handheld computing devices. Examples of such content and services accessible by users of computing devices include e-mail, instant messaging, multi-player gaming, peer-to-peer file transfer, web browsing, social networking, photograph hosting, as well as online databases and other network-accessible data.
It is common practice to limit access to content and services based upon access permissions of users seeking to access services. In this regard, some users may be denied access to a service, while some may have limited access to the service, and others may enjoy unfettered access to the service. However, current methods of managing access permissions may require a user to manage access permissions for services using a central access management provider. In this regard, access permissions must be set for each user of a protected service, such as by identifying users and grouping them in access permissions lists where each access permission list conveys a certain level of access rights. Each time a new user is added to the service, access permissions must be configured individually for the new user. Thus when a user seeks to access a service, the user must authenticate to or otherwise be identified by the central access management provider so that the central access management provider may determine the user's defined access permissions and grant access to the service accordingly.
Current methods and systems for managing access rights do not sufficiently allow for a distributed approach where access permissions may be managed independent of user identity. Accordingly, it may be advantageous to provide users with a system for distributed access rights management using access rights filters. Such a system may thereby address at least some of the disadvantages described above.